A Wise Man for the World

Singapore's philosopher-king on an ascendant China, the threat of Islamism and America's entitlements crisis.

China already
dominates Asia and intends to become the world's leading power. The
United States is not yet a "second rate power," but the inability of its
political leaders to make unpopular decisions bodes poorly. Russia,
Japan, Western Europe and India are, for the most part, tired
bureaucracies. If Iran gets the bomb, a nuclear war in the Middle East
is almost inevitable.These are among the many frank
forecasts laid out in a slim volume based on the experiences and
insights of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, its prime
minister from 1959 to 1990, and Asia's ranking philosopher-king for much
of the past half-century. Tiny Singapore has always been too small a
stage for a leader of Mr. Lee's intellect and ego. His interests have
extended across the globe, as has his influence. For decades, world
leaders, corporate CEOs, scholars and journalists have made the
pilgrimage to Singapore to seek his views. "Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's
Insights on China, the United States, and the World" forms a kind of
last testament of the ailing, 89-year-old Mr. Lee. It is based on
interviews with Mr. Lee by the authors—Graham Allison, a professor of
government at Harvard's Kennedy School, and Robert Blackwill, a former
U.S. diplomat—to which the authors add a distillation of Mr. Lee's
speeches, writings and interviews with others over many years.The book focuses forward on Mr. Lee's
prognostications, not backward on his accomplishments. Messrs. Allison
and Blackwill refrain from commentary on the man and his ideas, letting
readers interpret for themselves. The downside of such restraint is that
"Lee Kuan Yew" doesn't truly convey Mr. Lee's combative candor or the
exceptional subtlety of mind that I was privileged to experience in my
own interviews with Mr. Lee over two decades. It was his combination of
penetrating brilliance about the wider world and prickly pettiness in
his own Singaporean laboratory (e.g., banning two Dow Jones publications
for the sin of free expression) that made him so fascinating.

Enlarge Image

Lee Kuan Yew

By Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill
(MIT, 186 pages, $17.95)

Beyond
Singapore, China has always been Mr. Lee's primary focus. China, he
says, is determined to be "the greatest power in the world," and it
expects to be accepted on its own terms, "not as an honorary member of
the West." Yet despite China's progress over the past 30 years, Mr. Lee
says, it has multiple "handicaps" to overcome, chief among them an
absence of the rule of law and the presence of widespread corruption.
The biggest fear of China's leaders, he says, is popular revulsion at
the corrosive effects of graft. The Chinese language itself—which "is
exceedingly difficult for foreigners to learn sufficiently to embrace
China and be embraced by its society"—is another obstacle to China's
great-power aspirations. So is a culture that does not "permit a free
exchange and contest of ideas." (Mr. Lee adopted English as Singapore's
national language; he never fully adopted free expression.)While competition between the United
States and China is inevitable, Mr. Lee argues, confrontation need not
be. (We, of course, might view China's widespread computer hacking as a
form of confrontation.) The U.S. shouldn't expect a democratic China:
"China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would
collapse." In China's 5,000 years of recorded history, he notes, the
emperor has ruled by right, and if the people disagree, "you chop off
heads, not count heads." Despite America's political gridlock
and excessive debt, Mr. Lee remains optimistic about the future of the
United States and its role in the world. In his view, America's
"creativity, resilience, and innovative spirit will allow it to confront
its core problems, overcome them and regain its competitiveness."
Americans believe that they can "make things happen," and thus they
usually do.Still, Mr. Lee worries about the
breakdown of civil society in the U.S.—individual rights (not paired
with individual responsibility) run amok—and about a growing culture of
entitlements. Sociologists, he says, have convinced Americans that
failure isn't their fault but the fault of the economic system. Once
charity became an entitlement, he observes, the stigma of living on
charity disappeared. As a result, entitlement costs outpace government
resources, resulting in huge debts for future generations. In the
meantime, America's political leaders kick the can down the road to win
elections. As so often is the case, Mr. Lee starkly says what others
think. Mr. Lee bluntly blames Saudi Arabia for
encouraging the growth of Islamist extremism by financing mosques,
religious schools and preachers world-wide to spread its "austere
version of Wahhabist Islam." What the West can do, he says, is to give
Muslim moderates the confidence to confront extremists for control of
the Islamic soul. But, he warns, if moderates continue to be intimidated
by extremists, they will find themselves living in repressive
theocracies like Iran. And if Iran gets the bomb, other Islamic states
like Saudi Arabia and Egypt will do so as well, unleashing the specter
of regional nuclear war.Mr. Lee's three political heroes are
Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese
leader who launched economic reform in the 1980s. The reason for Mr.
Lee's admiration: Each held a weak hand at a critical moment in history
and, through guts and determination, managed to win. Mr. Lee is a firm
believer that leaders are born, though managers can be made, and that
leaders should be judged by their accomplishments. "The acid test is in
performance, not promises." As with his three heroes, Mr. Lee began with
a weak hand in Singapore but, by playing it to maximum effect, made
himself a wise man for the world.Ms. House, a former publisher of The Wall Street
Journal and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is the author of "On
Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future."

A version of this article appeared February
26, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal,
with the headline: A Wise Man For the World.

2011.5.17李光耀先生的傳記應該從此點倒述回去
李資政或許終於知道政治無情
人 即使是國父 也將成為歷史人物

李光耀徹底引退Architect of modern Singapore steps down英國《金融時報》 凱文·布朗新加坡報導Singaporeans woke up on Sunday to the prospect of a government without the country's founding father Lee Kuan Yew – a dominating political figure who unexpectedly resigned from the cabinet after more than half a century in service.新加坡人周日得知，該國開國之父、主導政壇逾半個世紀的內閣資政李光耀(Lee Kuan Yew)將徹底退出政府。Mr Lee, 87, quit along with Goh Chok Tong, prime minister from 1990 to 2004, a week after the ruling People's Action party suffered its worst election result since independence in 1965.現年87歲的李光耀將與1990年至2004年擔任總理的國務資政吳作棟(Goh Chok Tong)一起退出內閣。一周前，執政的人民行動黨(People's Action Party)遭遇了自1965年新加坡獨立以來最糟糕的選舉結果。In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters' concerns.兩名前總理在一份聯合聲明中表示，他們希望為現任總理李顯龍(Lee Hsien Loong)提供一個“全新陣容”，李顯龍已承諾對選民的各項關切作出積極回應。Mr Lee, who has been prime minister or a senior cabinet minister since the beginning of colonial self-government in 1959, told state media his resignation was “the right thing to do, to give [the] PM and his team the room to break from the past”.自1959年新加坡成立自治政府起，李光耀一直擔任總理或資深內閣部長。他對官方媒體表示，他的辭職是“正確之舉，讓現任總理及其團隊擁有適當空間，能夠告別過去”。PAP won 81 of 87 elected parliamentary seats with 60.1 per cent of the vote in the last election on May 7 but was clearly shaken by an increase in the total opposition vote to 39.9 per cent from a third in 2006.在5月7日舉行的選舉中，人民行動黨以60.1%的得票率贏得87個議會席位中的81個議席，但由於反對黨的總得票率從2006年的三分之一升至39.9%，人民行動黨的地位顯然受到動搖。The retirement of the two former prime ministers has few implications for policy, since the government has already undertaken to address issues such as high immigration, income disparity and the price of government-subsidised housing.兩名前總理引退，對政府政策不會有什麼影響，因為政府已經承諾應對種種問題，如大量移民、收入差異，以及政府補貼住房的價格。However, political analysts said it was not purely symbolic and speculated that the prime minister, who is the son of Lee Kuan Yew, might take the opportunity to replace a number of other senior ministers with younger faces.不過，政治分析人士表示，此舉不只具有像徵意義，他們猜測，現任總理（李光耀之子）可能會藉此機會，用較年輕的面孔替換其它一些資深內閣部長。譯者/和風

***

Singapore politics

Not fade away

May 16th 2011, 14:14 by R.C. | SINGAPORE

SOMETIMES it seems that the founding-father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, has spent more time trying to tear himself away from running the island-state than he did ruling it in the first place. Now 87, he was Singapore’s first prime minister, serving for 31 years until 1990.
Rather than gracefully slipping into the background, however, he remained in the cabinet after 1990 as Senior Minister. Still unable to give it up, in 2004 a new post of Minister Mentor (MM) was invented for him in the cabinet of the government headed by his son, Lee Hsien Loong.
On May 14th, however, the elder Lee announced that he was finally resigning from the cabinet. Goh Chok Tong, Mr Lee's successor as prime minister, also declared that at the age of 69 he too was resigning his position as senior minister in the cabinet. But, inevitably, it was Mr Lee who grabbed all the attention. For any other politician of his age, the announcement could be taken as a final ending to a glittering career. Indeed, much of the mainstream Singapore media treated the event as such.
Not a bit of it. For a start, he will retain the parliamentary seat that he won (uncontested) in the general election on May 7th. He is sure to continue making plenty of speeches from the back benches, as he did in the last parliament, on almost every topic under the sun. He will doubtless continue to open hospitals, intervene in public debates and write more books, all in his stated quest to keep Singapore on the straight and narrow.
To quote the man himself (from 1988): “Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel that something is going wrong, I will get up. Those who believe that after I have left the government as prime minister, I will go into a permanent retirement, really should have their heads examined.”
More significant, perhaps, is the manner of his latest (semi-) going. The party that he helped to create, the People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore continuously since independence, has just endured its worst pasting at the polls since separation from Malaysia in 1965. Due to the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post voting system, the opposition won just six out of the 87 contested seats. More significantly, however, the PAP share of the vote dropped to a dangerously low 60.1%. Only a decade ago the party was getting 75.3%.
In the election post-mortems currently being conducted within and without the PAP, the party acknowledges that it has ceased to connect with the voters as it once did. And the prime culprit for some is Mr Lee himself. Once a supreme electoral asset, he is now something of a liability, especially with those under 40 who don’t remember the glory days. The straight-talking, almost bullying tone that served him well in the past doesn’t wash anymore with a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and self-confident electorate.
Too often, his party colleagues were left to do the political fire-fighting after another round of old fashioned plain-speaking from MM. He upset ethnic Malays with remarks that they had not adapted well to Singapore, and then during the middle of the campaign he infuriated many when he said people who voted against the PAP in one particular constituency would have “five years to live and repent” their decision. That constituency went to the opposition, and the PAP government lost its very good foreign secretary.
Within the PAP, and for many other Singaporeans, Mr Lee remains a revered figure. But it’s also clear that new generations of Singaporeans are ready to move onto a new era, and the PAP will have to reflect that or wither. It’s unclear whether a few men in white coats took MM aside to finally do some plain speaking of their own, or whether Mr Lee took the decision himself to resign from the cabinet. But the result is the same; the founding-father will continue to opine, but the PAP will have a little more room to change and adapt to a changed electoral landscape.

2013年2月26日 星期二

Business owners struggle to promote Taiwan

By Chris Wang / Staff reporter

Wu Cheng-san (吳成三) has arrived at his Taipei bookstore every day for
the past 20 years hoping to do good business. On a typical day earlier
this month he was once again disappointed, but not surprised.
The
tiny shop — Taiuan e Tiam (Shop of Taiwan) — stands in a quiet alley
opposite the National Taiwan University campus and was established in
March 1993 as the first Taiwan-themed bookstore.
Wu, 70,
reminisced about the good old days when daily sales reached NT$40,000
(US$1,350) and wondered why fewer people read books about Taiwan these
days.
“Ironically, I think people paid less attention to Taiwanese
history and culture after we had our first Taiwanese president, Lee
Teng-hui (李登輝), and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to
power,” said Wu, a former computer scientist at Columbia University who
moved back to Taiwan after martial law was lifted.
Wu said he
founded the bookstore with the simple mission of allowing customers to
find any Taiwan-related book they wanted in one place and was not
greatly concerned about making a profit.
The store boasts possibly
the most complete collection of Taiwan-related books anywhere —
covering everything from politics, culture, Hakka and Aboriginal
affairs, to Taiwan-themed English and Japanese-language books, Wu said.
However,
he wonders why daily revenue at the bookstore, which also sells CDs and
DVDs, souvenirs and T-shirts, has dropped to a few thousand NT dollars.
“Things
have changed, as more young people work in China and the government no
longer promotes Taiwanese culture and identity. Most television and
newspaper reports are now focused on China,” he said.
With the
emergence of the Internet and various publishing formats, people also
tend to read and buy fewer books, he said, adding that more than 70
percent of his revenue comes from multimedia sales. What surprises him
is that more people are interested in Aboriginal cultures, in particular
Aboriginal music.
Wu said he has no plans of closing the bookstore, despite slow sales,
figuring that by spending less money he would be able to make up for
the losses.
Black Lin (林文欽) of Avanguard Publishing shares similar
problems, but has exactly the same determination as Wu when it comes to
running a business tied to Taiwanese culture.
His publishing
company was established in 1982, when Lin was 30, during the Martial Law
era, when books on sensitive topics were banned and confiscated by the
Taiwan Garrison Command, Lin said. His company survived despite him once
running up debts of more than NT$10 million.
The firm publishes
25 to 30 books each year on a variety of Taiwan-related topics,
including politics, literature, languages, culture, folk traditions and
biographies.
The company grew hand-in-hand with Taiwan’s
opposition movement, Lin said, and sold most of its books on the
sidelines of election campaigns and political rallies, when police
tended to ignore book vendors.
However, competition in Taiwan’s
publishing sector has been fierce as more than 1,000 companies vie for a
share of a market valued between NT$25 billion and NT$30 billion a
year, with almost 60 percent of sales coming from textbooks, Lin said.
The
general decline in reading habits among Taiwanese, who on average spend
less than NT$1,500 per year on books, has hit Lin’s company as well as
competitors.

However, Lin says he has always been resilient and is determined to
preserve and promote Taiwanese culture. He has resisted the temptation
to publish books just because they would be popular.
“To me, doing so would be like asking a preacher to become a gigolo. I prefer to be a preacher,” Lin said.
The
publisher said he was proud of having put a comprehensive collection of
Taiwanese literature into print, as well as accounts, information and
commentaries on the 228 Massacre.
He added that he is working on
publishing books written by Western preachers, soldiers and scientists
who documented their stays in Taiwan in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Although
he has worked tirelessly to promote Taiwanese authors and publications,
Lin said his two best-selling books were written by foreigners:
Japanese manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi’s On Taiwan, published in
2000, and former US diplomat George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, a book
documenting the 228 Massacre, which was first published in 1965.
“I am going to keep doing this thing I love until I cannot do it anymore. It is my mission,” Lin said.

From Virginia Suburb, a Dissident Chinese Writer Continues His Mission

Cliff Owen/Associated Press

The writer Yu Jie, his wife, Liu Min, and their son, Yu Guangyi, in Washington last month after China allowed them to leave. Living now in Fairfax, Va., Mr. Yu says he hopes to stay but sees his “lifelong goal as achieving democracy and freedom in China.”

Published: February 25, 2012

FAIRFAX, Va. — If the place that the Chinese writer Yu Jie and his family live in nowadays, a modest house in this pleasant Northern Virginia suburb, seems ordinary, the story of what brought them here is anything but.

In January, Mr. Yu, one of the foremost critics of China’s leadership, left China after months of abuse, house arrest and round-the-clock surveillance by the state. At its worst, it was flat-out torture: in a detention cell, security officers bent back Mr. Yu’s fingers one by one, kicked him in the chest and held burning cigarettes close to his face, he said.

“If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know,” Mr. Yu said the head officer told him.

Mr. Yu fainted and was taken to a hospital, where doctors pulled him from death’s door, he said. That was on Dec. 9, 2010. Months later, after returning home, he talked to family and friends about leaving China.

“I said multiple times before that as long as my life was not threatened, I would not leave China,” he said in the two-story house where he and his family live, which belongs to a church friend. “But after Liu Xiaobo’s arrest, I was tortured by the government and almost lost my life.”

Mr. Liu, one of Mr. Yu’s closest friends, wrote Charter 08, a manifesto calling for gradual political reforms, and was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison, a move that contributed to Mr. Liu’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the next year. Mr. Yu, 38, was placed under house arrest in Beijing in October 2010, five days after the Nobel committee announced Mr. Liu’s award, and then, in December, was detained. He was tortured for three hours.

Though there are dissidents like Mr. Liu who maintain they will never leave China, Mr. Yu said his friends supported his decision. “They said the situation for people like us is going to get worse, not better,” he said.

The security apparatus is on full alert this year during a once-a-decade leadership transition in China, when the Communist Party reshuffles its top officials.

The last of Mr. Yu’s 11 books was an attack on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, whom many Chinese praise as having an empathic character. But Mr. Yu argued in “China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao” that that was merely a construct intended to fool ordinary Chinese. He said he did not expect much better from Xi Jinping, who is likely to be China’s next president, and those who surround him. Mr. Xi went on a carefully choreographed five-day tour of the United States this month.

“The country’s leader is simply a guy selected by a few of the most powerful families in China to work for them,” Mr. Yu said. “It’s because they’re in this power scheme together, and because they benefit from it, and because the social conflict in China is a lot sharper now. To maintain the status quo, they’ll do whatever they can.”

Mr. Yu is finishing two books scheduled to be published this year in Hong Kong. One is a critique of Hu Jintao, the current president, and the other is a biography of Mr. Liu.

“I think I truly became a political dissident after 1999, when I became friends with Liu Xiaobo and took part in the following decade or so in all the activities he did for human rights in China,” Mr. Yu said.

His political education actually began in his hometown, Chengdu. “I was 16 during the 1989 protests, and this had a big impact on me,” he said. “I didn’t take part, but every night we would listen to BBC and the Voice of America.”

Mr. Yu studied modern Chinese literature at Peking University. He began writing essays and passed around printouts and photocopies to friends.

He was labeled a literary sensation when his first book, “Fire and Ice,” appeared in 1998. It was a scathing work of social and political criticism that the China scholar Geremie R. Barmé called “undoubtedly the most provocative book of its kind to have appeared in years.”

Mr. Yu even quoted Mr. Liu in his book, which Mr. Barmé noted was apparently the first time someone on the mainland had publicly cited him in a positive light in years. Mr. Liu had been sentenced in 1996 to three years of hard labor for his writings.

Mr. Yu’s writings were packaged with those of two other intellectuals. Liu Xia, the wife of Liu Xiaobo, gave her husband the books while he was in prison “to show that a younger generation of writers was active,” Mr. Yu said. But Mr. Liu published a harsh critique of the writings.

Nevertheless, another prominent writer, Liao Yiwu, arranged a dinner in Beijing where Mr. Liu and Mr. Yu met. A working friendship was born. The two wrote together and led the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Their relationship extended through the writing of Charter 08, when Mr. Yu discussed drafts with Mr. Liu. Mr. Yu, who converted to Christianity in 2003, said he had extensive input on the part about religious freedom.

“Christianity gives me a very strong basis for my faith,” he said. “I don’t think that democracy can be a faith. Only a more ultimate goal would allow me to withstand all the difficulties I’ve gone through.”

Mr. Yu said his work with Mr. Liu had been a focus of his interrogation in December 2010. “They asked in detail about articles I had written in the past 10 years,” he said. “They asked a lot of questions about my interaction with Liu Xiaobo and the mothers of Tiananmen Square victims, and they asked about my trips abroad.”

He said the interrogators also singled out the biography of Mr. Liu that he was writing and the book about Mr. Wen.

Four days after being tortured, Mr. Yu was released but forced to stay in Chengdu for three months. Even after returning to Beijing, he was told by officers to leave the capital during certain times, like the annual anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Whenever one of his articles was published in Hong Kong, officers would show up to harass him in Beijing, he said. He began thinking about leaving last spring, and got permission last month, he said. Officials probably believed it would be better to have him outside China in this transition year, Mr. Yu said. Officers accompanied him, his wife, Liu Min, and their son, Yu Guangyi, to the Beijing airport boarding gate and took their picture.

And how will he remain relevant while outside China? Mr. Yu said he believed the Internet would help. He has a Twitter account, @yujie89, with nearly 30,000 followers. (He said he preferred not to use Chinese microblogs because of censorship.)

Mr. Yu said his immediate goals were to apply for asylum and finish the two books due this year. Then he plans to work on a book about the history of Christianity in China.

“Maybe in a couple years I’ll have a green card, and maybe I’ll become an American citizen,” he said. “But I see my career and lifelong goal as achieving democracy and freedom in China. And so my goal is to eventually return to China.”

Helen Gao contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: February 25, 2012
In an earlier version of this article, a headline misspelled the name of Yu Jie as Yu Ji.

2013年2月24日 星期日

A Grammy-Winning Formula for Paul McCartney: Don't Show Up

By DAVE ITZKOFFFebruary 21, 2013

Would you have any interest in speaking to Paul McCartney
about the Grammy Award he won on Sunday, a publicist asked over e-mail
the other day. O.K., O.K., twist our arms, why don't you?
Mr. McCartney won the Grammy for traditional pop album for "Kisses on the Bottom,"
a collection of his covers of standards like "It's Only a Paper Moon"
and "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," as well as new songs like "My
Valentine," which he wrote for his wife, Nancy Shevell. It is one of at
least a few distinctions Mr. McCartney has received in a career that
includes numerous solo offerings, several albums with Wings and, before
that, his records made with a pop quartet called the Beatles.

Mr. McCartney spoke from Britain about his Grammy
victory and why, by design, he wasn't at this year's ceremony. The
conversation (excerpts below) began just before 7 a.m. Friday morning,
when an unlisted phone number appeared on this reporter's cell phone and
a voice responded, "Hello, David."Q.Is this who I think it is?A.Yeah, sorry, this is Paul. Yeah, Paul McCartney.Q.[after ecstatic laughter] Good morning, how are you?A.You're in a jolly mood this morning. I'm very well, thank you. How can I help you?Q.So you've just won another Grammy Award. Don't you ever get tired of these things?A.Nope. You don't
get tired. It's very nice. And the Grammys have become more and more
important, media-wise. It's a bigger, better show. When you look at all
the people in the musical field who are up for them, it's gratifying to
think that you've picked one up.Q.It's been reported
that this is your first Grammy for an album of new recordings since
"Let It Be." [Mr. McCartney has also since won Grammys for individual
songs, and the "Band on the Run" album won a Grammy for its engineer,
Geoff Emerick.] Does that sound right to you?A.You know what? I don't keep count. I'm the worst on facts about me or facts about the Beatles. It's like, "It's 50 years to the day--"
And I go, "Oh is it?" What am I supposed to do? Keep a little diary and
watch every little event? So, no, I'm always pleasantly surprised at
these facts or these fictions. I can't help you on that. I'm sure
there's a million experts who could verify that. It's nice, because I
don't have to keep track. There's a lot of other people who keep track
for me. It's a luxury.Q.I imagine it must be gratifying to be recognized for this album in particular, which was such a departure for you.A.It is a
completely different kind of album. I'm very pleased, also, for the
producer, Tommy LiPuma, and Al Schmitt, the engineer, they're such cool
guys, very old school. And we had such a ball with Diana Krall. There
was a moment in the studio where we were struggling with an intro, I
think - although I must say, we didn't struggle too much on this album -
but it wasn't like it was all charted. We just had the chords and the
words, and we did pretty much improvisations. And there was a moment
where we were struggling with an intro - should it be this or should we
open like this? And Diana was looking a little bit worried. And I said,
"Diana, look. I'm from Britain and I'm in L.A., the sun is shining, I'm
in Capitol's famous Studio A where Nat King Cole recorded. Diana, I'm on
holiday."Q.The victory is its own reward, of course, but you weren't at the Grammys ceremony this year. Why not?A.We started to
get a theory that when you don't go, that's when you win. But Nancy
likes the event, and I do too, because she does. In some ways, it's
better than the Oscars - the Oscars are great and super-important, but
the Grammys is like a really cool concert and you get some very good
performances. But this is what happens: We went a couple of times and
sort of sat there, and graciously accepted defeat. With that moment you
look for at the Oscars or the Grammys, when the cameras go to the people
who didn't win, and they're smiling wonderfully and applauding. "And
the winner is - John Mayer!" And you go: [through clenched teeth] "Oh,
wonderful. How wonderful. What a good singer." Secretly you're thinking,
"He's not as good as me though." It's a very human moment.
This year I was actually presenting at the Baftas,
they'd asked me to present a film music award that night. And then
coming home from that, I got a text saying "You've won a Grammy." So the
car was alight with triumph. Hence the theory, you mustn't go if you
want to win. But having said that, we might go next year.Q.Do you have one place where you keep all your awards and trophies?A.No, I don't.
I'm particularly lax on that. I don't know where they all are. I'm just
not organized. I said to someone the other day, "Would you believe the
Beatles were up for an Oscar, for 'Let It Be,' and we didn't even know
we were up for it?"Q.Is that even possible?A.Well, exactly.
In those days, it was. Because it was less of a global ceremony. And the
Beatles were very much in a - "Let It Be" was the time that we were
breaking up, so the news had not reached us. If you take that as
indication, how unconcerned - how unplugged - we just weren't plugged
into that. Nowadays it's very hard to avoid it. I don't think any of us
ever collected all of our gold discs, to put them up on walls. So I
don't have a trophy room. Some of them go up in my office, which I think
is an appropriate place to intimidate businesspeople. [laughs] Which is
my aim in life.
I'm very honored to get them. I don't organize them and catalog them.
The excuse is always - which is the truth - I'm too busy doing it. I'm
talking to you now before I go into the recording studio to record new
songs of mine. I love that - I love that I still am enthusiastic, I've
still got the energy and the desire to keep doing it. So the analysis
has to take a back seat.Q.What's the album you're working on now?A.It's a new
studio record, my new songs. I'm always writing songs and I've got a
bunch that I want to record. I've been working with a variety of
producers, and today I'm actually working George Martin's son, Giles.
I'm actually just going down the road to the studio. I'm just going to
pull over, have a little walk down the road, pull into the studio and
start thrashing about on my guitar.Q.Those fellows that you worked with at the 12-12-12 benefit concert, will they show up on your new album?A."Cut Me Some
Slack," which I did with the Nirvana boys, will be on Dave Grohl's
album. That's his project. He just rang me up, said: "Do you want to
come over for a jam? I'm working on this project about the old Sound
City days." I was in L.A., so I went over with my wife and two of my
daughters and they just hung, the gals, while me and Dave went over to
the studio, feeling like two little teenagers escaping. Dave got on the
drums, I got on guitar, Krist Novoselic got on bass, Pat Smear got on
guitar. I just shouted some words - [demonstrates] "Mamaaaaaaaa!" - got
into that mode. What was so lovely about it was that it really was just,
"Hey, do you want to have a jam?" It was totally organic. It was like
an improv afternoon. Really if you think about it, it should be
something that a major label would dream up. [executive's voice] "I want
you boys to get together, and we're going to put a lot of money behind
this." But it wasn't, it was just our idea and we did it in one
afternoon.Q.Well, you've got my number now. Feel free to give me a ring if you'd ever like to jam in New York.A.What do you play?Q.I play the plastic guitar in Rock Band.A.Oh, cool. I bet
you're better at it than I am. My grandkids always beat me at Rock
Band. And I say, Listen, you may beat me at Rock Band, but I made the
original records, so shut up.

別問保羅·麥卡特尼有關「披頭士」的事

DAVE ITZKOFF報道2013年02月21日

你願不願和保羅·麥卡特尼(Paul McCartney)聊聊他在星期日獲得格萊美獎的事？那天，一個公關人員給我發郵件說。沒問題，沒問題。我們被說服了，為什麼不呢？
麥卡特尼以一張傳統流行專輯《信末的吻》(Kisses on the Bottom)
而獲得格萊美獎，專輯中收錄了他翻唱的標準曲，如《紙月亮》(It’s Only a Paper
Moon)和《最愛美好》(Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive)，此外還有《我的情人》(My
Valentine)等新歌，這首歌是獻給他的妻子南希·舍維爾(Nancy
Shevell)的。這個獎項至少是麥卡特尼先生在作品眾多的音樂生涯中所獲得的榮譽之一——他的有些專輯是與雙翼樂隊(Wings)合作完成，而在那之
前則是作為一個流行四人樂隊的成員錄專輯，樂隊的名字就叫做“披頭士”(Beatles)。

Happy Birthday, Paul McCartney: 70 Iconic Images for 70 Years

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Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

Rock
and roll band 'The Quarrymen' later known as 'The Beatles' perform
onstage at their first concert at the Casbah Coffee House in 1959 in
Liverpool, England.

Today, Paul McCartney turns
70. To celebrate the legendary rocker, TIME looks back at that faithful
day when McCartney, then a cherub-faced 15-year-old, asked John Lennon
if he could borrow a guitar…
An incised sandstone plaque on the wall of St. Peter’s Church Hall in
Woolton, a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Liverpool, commemorates
the event as if it had religious significance—as indeed it very nearly
does:

In This Hall On

6th July 1957

John & Paul

First Met

No need to ask about last names.
The afternoon was oppressively hot and humid. The occasion was a
church fete, a few -summer hours of festivities in the yard next to St.
Peter’s cemetery: lemonade and ice cream and cakes and musical acts and
performing horses and police dogs. Lots of kids. One of the acts was a
group of local boys called the Quarrymen, named after the public high
school they attended, Quarry Bank (itself named after Woolton Quarry,
where sandstone was mined). The band played skiffle—kind of an English
variety of jug-band music popular in the ’50s, thumped out on guitar,
banjo, drums and tea-chest bass—along with a little rock ’n’ roll. Its
singer and lead guitarist, a sideburned, eagle-nosed 16-year-old in a
checked cowboy shirt with the collar turned up, preferred rock ’n’ roll.
John Lennon could barely play his guitar—it had only four strings, and
he used banjo chords—but with his hoarse yet tuneful voice and cheeky
attitude, he was spellbinding. Among the band’s rock repertory was the
Del-Vikings’ “Come Go with Me.” Lennon, not really knowing the words,
simply made up his own: “Come go with me/ Down to the penitentiary
. . .” Somehow he made it work.
After the fete, there was to be a grand dance in the Village Hall
across the road. George Edge’s Orchestra would play for the adults; the
Quarrymen would entertain the kids. As the long summer twilight faded,
thunder rumbled portentously; the heat wave would break that night. As
the skiffle group took its instruments into the hall, a close friend of
Lennon’s named Ivan Vaughan approached him with a request: Did he have
any interest in meeting another friend of his, a boy who could sing and
play guitar? The boy was good, Vaughan said.
In a few minutes, Lennon found out how good. The boy, a cherub-faced
15-year-old with big hazel eyes, pouty lips and his dark hair slicked
back rock-’n’-roll style, was ceremoniously dressed in a white sports
jacket backed with silver threads: a showy touch that Lennon, in his
tight teddy-boy jeans and cowboy shirt, would have found disconcerting.
Then Paul McCartney asked to borrow a guitar.
(MORE:Happy Birthday, Paul McCartney: 70 Iconic Images for 70 Years)
The Quarrymen’s instruments were strung for right-handers; McCartney
was a lefty. No matter. He’d dealt with this problem before: you simply
played upside-down. And that’s what he did, performing a near
letter-perfect cover of Eddie Cochran’s fast-moving mouthful -“Twenty
Flight Rock,” to the astonishment of Lennon and his bandmates. “I knew a
lot of the words,” McCartney later recalled. “That was very good
currency in those days.”
Then the young natural showman decided to top that.
McCartney sat down at the hall’s upright piano and blazed through
Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” “It was uncanny,” Quarrymen
guitarist Eric Griffiths told Bob Spitz, author of The Beatles, many years later. “He could play and sing in a way that none of us could, including John. He had such confidence; he gave a performance. It was so natural. We couldn’t get enough of it. It was a real eye opener.”
For his part, Lennon recalled (to Beatles biographer Hunter Davies),
“I half thought to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ Now I thought, if I
take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to
keep him in line if I let him join [the band]. But he was good, so he
was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.”
That was an understatement. From that day forward, the two would be
inextricably bound, in each other’s minds as well as the world’s.
(MORE: Old Paul McCartney Letter Shows Early Search for Beatles Drummer)
The doe-eyed phenom who rocked John Lennon’s world that hot July
afternoon was, underneath the white sports jacket and the bravado, far
more vulnerable than he let on. Paul McCartney’s adored mother, Mary, a
midwife and visiting nurse, had died of breast cancer, at age 47, only
nine months earlier, leaving Paul, his younger brother, Mike, and their
father, Jim, an amateur musician who worked as a salesman for a
Liverpool cotton firm, to try to muddle through without her.
For several months, they barely made it: Jim was reeling with grief.
“That was the worst thing for me, hearing my dad cry,” Paul remembered.
“You expect to see women crying or kids in the playground or even
yourself . . . But when it’s your dad, then you know something’s really
wrong, and it shakes your faith in everything. But I was determined not
to let it affect me. I carried on. I learned to put a shell around me at
that age.”
Music was the main component of the shell. It came naturally: the
whole extended McCartney family was musical. As a young man in the
1920s, Jim had fronted a dance band, and he still played a mean piano by
ear (“His left one,” Paul McCartney liked to joke).
The McCartneys made music whenever they got together, and at first,
trumpet was Paul’s instrument. But he was also beginning to listen to
American rock ’n’ roll late at night on Radio Luxembourg—there was no
rock on English radio in those days—and to grow intoxicated by its
rhythms. Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t about trumpets. And then there was the
fact that you couldn’t sing while you played a horn.
(MORE: McCartney Comes Back)
Rock was hitting England like a slow-moving tsunami in the mid-’50s.
Prior to 1950, as Liver-pool local historian Joan Murray explains,
“there were no teenagers.” Especially in that rough-hewn, northern port
city along the River Mersey, where working-class and middle-class kids
mostly just got out of school and got on with life. But Liverpool, so
red brick dingy and looked down upon by London, was also peculiarly
receptive to rock ’n’ roll—in part, because of the steady inflow of
American culture through the docks. Now, suddenly, amid the postwar
recovery, Liverpool kids had a couple of shillings to rub together, and
with the records they were buying—records by Little Richard, Chuck
Berry, Buddy Holly and, especially, Elvis—came new dreams.
Shortly after his 14th birthday, Paul went to a downtown music shop
and traded his trumpet for a Zenith acoustic guitar. He practiced
obsessively, struggling to teach himself chords, but everything felt
backward to the left-hander, until he hit on the idea of restringing the
instrument—with the bass and treble strings reversed.
In the wake of his mother’s death, his obsession with the instrument
redoubled. He would lock himself in the bathroom and practice for hours
at a time. Initially a promising student—English literature and
languages (Spanish and German) were his best subjects—at the prestigious
public Liverpool Institute, he began to neglect his studies for the one
thing that could take him away from all his troubles. When John Lennon
sent a message (through a bandmate named Pete Shotton) asking him to
join the Quarrymen, Paul McCartney didn’t have to think twice.
Skiffle stayed in the group’s repertoire for a while, but Lennon had
little patience for it. Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” had
electrified him (as it had McCartney). That—the sound, the look, the
attitude—was what he was after. Meanwhile, the band started to break
apart, as Lennon and his original mates graduated from Quarry Bank in
1958, and all but John, the dreamer and misfit, drifted off toward real
life. But McCartney had introduced Lennon to a younger schoolmate from
the Institute, a tiny, cocky 14-year-old, with jug ears and big hair.
His name was George Harrison. “George was my little friend,” McCartney
recalled many years later, with fond condescension. “But he could play
guitar.” And George liked rock ’n’ roll.
(MORE: That Old Feeling: Meet the Beatles)
McCartney helped Lennon advance on the instrument, and with the
big-eared little guy playing lead, all at once they were a rock-’n’-roll
trio. On Sept. 18, 1959, a front-page story in the West Derby Reporter
covered the recent opening of the Casbah, a new club for teenagers in
the Liverpool suburb. The club was in the windowless basement of a huge,
rambling old house in a residential neighborhood—the performance space,
such as it was, the size of a coal bin. The account went on to mention
“a guitar group which entertains the club members on Saturday nights
. . . [T]he group, who call themselves ‘The Quarrymen,’ travel from the
south end of the city to play. They are: John Lennon, Menlove Avenue,
Woolton; Paul McCartney, Forthlin Road, Allerton; and George Harrison,
Upton Green, Speke.”
A photo with the story shows McCartney, soulful in dark shirt and
light tie, -confidently strumming his guitar and singing into a mike
while Lennon, seemingly a little less sure of his playing, stares down
at his instrument, carefully fingering a chord. Two girls and a boy sit
on a bench to the right, paying careful attention. The caption reads:
“Three ‘cool cats’ listen to ‘The Quarrymen.’ ” The polite-looking,
well-dressed young English people resemble anything but cool cats. The
girl on the left, smiling at McCartney, is Cynthia Powell, who will
later marry Lennon.

Astrid Kirchherr —Courtesy of Vladislav Ginzburg

Astrid Kirchherr's first group
photo of The Beatles taken at the Hamburg fairground, just blocks away
from the Reeperbahn district where the group played nightly. Pete Best,
George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney Stuart Sutcliffe. Hamburg,
Germany 1960.

-----

2009.10.23

Paul McCartney announces Good Evening Europe Tour, including only U.K. date of 2009

Paul McCartney has announced his first European tour in more than five years

Paul
McCartney will make his first European tour in more than five years
this December, a seven-city run that will include his only United
Kingdom concert appearance of 2009.
"This is my chance to bring
our current show home to where it all began," McCartney said in a
statement on his website. "Starting in Hamburg, ending in London and
rocking everywhere in between. I'm very much looking forward to ending
the year on a high."
On the heels of this summer's blockbuster
U.S. tour, the December dates will see Macca play seven arena shows
across Europe, culminating with his first public performance at London's
O2 Arena, and his only U.K. date of the year. Other firsts on the tour
include shows at Berlin’s O2 World venue and Dublin’s The O2.
Berlin
will get their first Paul McCartney concert in 16 years - since 1993's
"New World Tour" - and the tour commences in Hamburg, Germany, a city
The Beatles made history in 49 years ago. The run will mark his first
time in Hamburg, Arnhem, Cologne and Dublin since the "Back in the
World" tour in 2003. McCartney's last Paris concert was an intimate club
show at the Olympia in 2007.

London's O2 Arena will host the final Paul McCartney show of 2009.

Last week, Paul McCartney revealed the full details of his Good Evening New York City CD/DVD
package, due to be released November 17 in America through Hear
Music/Concord Music Group. The muli-disc set will include his
performances of Beatles, Wings and solo classics during his three-night
stand at Citi Field in Flushing, NY, July 17, 18 and 21 on the "Summer
Live '09" tour.

Ozzie Sweet helped redefine photography

Ozzie Sweet,
right, directs Jackie Robinson during a shoot for the October 1951 cover
of Sport magazine. Sweet died Wednesdday at 94.Ozzie Sweet Archives via
New York Times News Serv

At the end of World War II, Ozzie Sweet’s picture of a friend
posed as a German soldier surrendering appeared on the cover of Newsweek
— “the magazine of news significance," as it billed itself then. Not a
stratagem that would pass muster in contemporary journalism, but Sweet,
who had apprenticed to the Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum,
appeared in a Cecil B. DeMille film and helped create promotional ads
for the U.S. Army, found the art in photography to be in creating an
image, not capturing one.
He considered himself not a news
photographer but a photographic illustrator, and like the work of the
painter Norman Rockwell, whom he claimed as an influence, his signature
images from the 1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, many in the
fierce hues of increasingly popular color film that emulated the
emergent Technicolor palate of U.S. movies, helped define — visually,
anyway — an era.
Sweet, who was 94 when he died Wednesday at his
home in York Harbor, Maine, took photographs that appeared on an
estimated 1,800 magazine covers.
He shot, it seemed, for everyone,
from top-flight general-interest publications like Look and Collier’s,
to men’s magazines like Argosy, to women’s books like Family Circle, to
myriad hunting and fishing publications (for which his deer and ducks
were sometimes borrowed from a taxidermist), to photography magazines,
recreation magazines (he shot a lot of young women on ski slopes and in
bikinis on beaches) and health magazines.
He made Rockwell-like
pictures of boys and their dogs, smiling soldiers returning from war,
families on vacation. He also made garish photographs for lurid
publications like Official Detective, for which one cover depicted a
woman lying on an inflatable raft, seemingly about to be attacked by a
scuba diver with a knife; and Real Romances, for which he depicted a
young man and woman frolicking in a hayloft, next to the headline “Old
Enough for Sin."
Much of his best-known work was portraiture. For
Newsweek, he produced images of Albert Einstein in his office, smiling
at a joke about his shoes; Ingrid Bergman in a suit of armor, her
costume for a Broadway play; and Bob Feller simulating his windup. He
photographed Dwight D. Eisenhower as the president of Columbia
University, Jimmy Durante with a butterfly perched on his famous schnozz
(it was glued there), Jack Nicklaus in a fake follow-through for Golf.
He photographed Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, Fla., full of
cats, for Cat Fancy.
But Sweet became most closely associated with
Sport, a monthly magazine that predated Sports Illustrated and after
1947 featured dozens, if not hundreds, of his portraits on its cover.
Johnny Unitas, Jim Brown, Maurice Richard, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio,
Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle were all his subjects.
Sometimes,
he positioned them trading-card style, in poses suggestive of action, as
with Jackie Robinson seemingly in midslide; sometimes, he contrived an
imaginative image, as he did with Roger Maris, with a half-dozen bats
flying in the air around him. (To make the picture Sweet suspended the
bats in midair with fishing line.) Still others were immediate, intimate
close-ups.
He took dozens of pictures of Mantle, many collected
in a 1998 book, “Mickey Mantle: The Yankee Years," in collaboration with
the writer Larry Canale. The two men later traveled together during
spring training and produced a second book of old and new photographs,
“The Boys of Spring: Scenic Images From the Grapefruit League,
1948-2004."
Ozzie Sweet was born Oscar Cowan Corbo on Sept. 10,
1918, in Stamford, Conn. His parents divorced when he was a toddler.
When his mother, Elsie Cowan, a nurse who was also an avid photographer,
married Hardy Sweet, a mechanic, the family moved to New Russia, N.Y.,
in the Adirondacks. He returned to Stamford, where he finished high
school and also worked as an assistant to Borglum, who had built a
studio in the area.
Young Ozzie, however, also aspired to be an
actor, and he moved to California, where he appeared as an extra in
several movies, including “Reap the Wild Wind" (1942), a 19th-century
adventure story, directed by DeMille, that starred John Wayne.
Shortly
after the United States entered World War II, Sweet enlisted in the
Army, where he became a photographer. He was stationed in San Diego,
where he took his first Newsweek cover, a staged photograph of a GI in
training, peering over a rock with a knife in his teeth.
Sweet
remained in the Army until after the war was over and then went to work
for Newsweek. It was the Feller photograph, in June 1947, that changed
the path of his career. As the story goes, it was seen by the editor of
Sport, who contacted him. When Sweet protested that he wasn’t a sports
photographer, the editor replied that that’s exactly why they wanted
him.
Sweet’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his
wife, the former Diane Rocco, whom he married in 1974 and who confirmed
his death, he is survived by two daughters, Pamela and Linnea Sweet; a
son, Blair; and a grandson.
Sweet was nothing if not prolific.
Beyond his magazine work, he took photographs for advertisements and
packaging (his picture of a collie appeared on boxes of Milk Bone). He
shot antique cars, puppies and kittens for calendars. And he provided
the photographs for a series of wildlife books for children, including
“City of Birds and Beasts," focusing on denizens of the Bronx Zoo.
Diana
Sweet said her husband was “a real guy’s guy," and it showed in what
she said were his most frequent subjects: “Sports, automobiles and
women."
Perhaps that was true, but Sweet had a practical
explanation for his interest in photographing these things — well,
women, anyway. In an article for the magazine The Camera in 1948, he
offered advice for the photographer who wanted to sell cover shots.
“Photographs
of pretty girls occupy more cover space than any other type of
subject," he wrote, adding: “Basically there are about four types of
magazines which always use girl pictures for covers. These are the
fashion, women’s, cheesecake and romance publications. On the other
hand, farm journals, garden, medical, science, travel, sport, picture
and news magazines invariably resort to a girl photograph if they can
find a logical excuse. All art editors are fully aware of the pretty
girl potential and honestly like to take full advantage of this natural
popularity."